We provide an explanation for why estate taxation is surprisingly little used over the world, given the skewness of the estate distribution. Taxing estates implies meddling with intra-family decisions, which may be frown upon by many. At the same time, the concentration of estates means that a low proportion of the population stands to gain a lot by decreasing estate taxation. We provide an ana...

Electronic Commerce is the execution of business processes using Internet technologies continues to be a significant, pervasive issue for both enterprises and customers. Management of relationships between enterprises and customers has often been referred to as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This paper considers such challenges, linked to the consumer’s understanding and the usability ...

We analyze non-cooperative commodity taxation in a two-country trade model characterized by monopolistic competition and international firm and capital mobility. In this setting, taxes in one country affect foreign welfare through the relocation of mobile firms and through changes in the rents accruing to capital owners. With consumption-based taxation, these fiscal externalities exactly offset...

Analyzing a homogenous household setting with endogenous fertility and endogenous labor supply, we demonstrate that moving from joint taxation to individual taxation and adapting child benefits so as to keep fertility constant entails a Pareto improvement. The change is associated with an increase in labor supply and consumption and a reduction of the marginal income tax, while the child benefi...

We set up a two-period model, where individuals finance educational investment and first-period consumption by borrowing against risky second-period labor income. We show that the government should use both education subsidies and capital taxation to mitigate distortions, stemming from social insurance through labor taxation, and we derive a Ramsey-rule for the optimal combination of these inst...

The Taxation of Couples This paper is concerned with the question of how couples should be taxed. One reason for the importance of this issue is simply that the overwhelming majority of individuals live in households formed around couples, and so it could be argued that empirically, this is the single most important problem in personal income taxation. A second reason is that the economic theor...

This paper shows how the sampling distribution of estimates of deadweight costs from taxation can be simulated and used to construct confidence intervals. The method is applied to the models and data developed by Diewert and Lawrence (1994, 1996) to study the marginal costs of taxation in New Zealand but the methods proposed have more general relevance. The application shows that the data are u...

Recent empirical studies of dividend taxation have found that: (1) dividend tax cuts cause large, immediate increases in dividend payouts, and (2) the increases are driven by firms with high levels of share ownership among top executives or the board of directors. These findings are inconsistent with existing theories of dividend taxation. We show that an agency model in which managers and shar...

The taxation of corporate profits in the United States has been one of the most widely discussed issues in the area of public finance. Corporate revenues are currently subject to double taxation. Profits are taxed first at the corporate level and then, when distributed as dividends or when capital gains are realized, taxed a second time at the individual level. The share of tax revenues from co...